Dell Says SAP’s HANA Has ‘Scalability Issues’

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Dell Inc. CIO Andi Karaboutis says it took six months of testing before her team was able to successfully run SAP AG’s analytic application, HANA, because of the size and complexity of the data being analyzed.

SAP is counting on HANA, introduced in June 2011, to offset slowing growth in customer spending in its traditional segments, such as ECC, an application used by large companies to manage inventory and other business processes. Monday afternoon in New York it introduced a new visualization tool called Lumira that it says makes it easier for business executives to view analysis produced by HANA. The company boasts that HANA makes it easy to analyze huge amounts of data from a wide variety of sources in real-time, but Dell’s experience would show that achieving those results in real-world circumstances is far from a slam-dunk.

According to Ms. Karaboutis, Dell is tracking customer behavior and transactions across a number of venues, including its own website, social networks, and from transactional data supplied by resale partners. The data is stored in a number of databases, including those from Oracle Corp. and Teradata Corp. The computer company is trying to reinvent itself as a broader services company in the face of flagging sales of personal computers, and getting a better understanding of customer preferences is key to that effort.

But Ms. Karaboutis said during an interview that, “we’re not in production yet [because of] some scalability issues.” She said HANA may not have been as robust as it needed to be when it was introduced to the market, and while SAP marketed it as being able to parse data from a variety of sources, the system struggled to do that. “That’s one of the reasons it took so long to implement,” she said, and is “why it’s taken so long” for Dell executives to get those needed insights about customers. But she added that she still thinks SAP has “a great product.”

Steve Lucas, SAP’s president of platform solutions, said Monday that SAP intentionally went after big accounts when it first introduced HANA in order to establish its credibility. Noting that SAP will soon sign its two-thousandth HANA customer, he said, “if we hadn’t started with big customers, we wouldn’t be in this position.”

In an emailed response to Dell’s comments, he said “Dell is seeing significant benefit from investing in HANA… Dell was a VERY early adopter of HANA and we are grateful they brought a big challenge to us. In the end, HANA delivered.”

Mr. Lucas said HANA can perform a number of processing and analytic tasks, including transaction, text analysis, and predictive analytics, in live memory, which allows customers to get results almost instantaneously.

Data visualization tools such as Lumira generally make it easier for non-technical people to use complex analytics tools. They can also be used to display data to customers. Michael Gliedman, CIO of the National Basketball Association, was on hand Monday to help SAP introduce Lumira. Mr. Gliedman said HANA makes it possible for the NBA to show complex data sets, such as shooting efficiency or number of turnovers by individual players, on its website.

Mr. Gliedman said the NBA was “able to avoid any scaling issues,” and is able to generate “instant access to 4.5 quadrillion combinations of NBA statistics.”

Ms. Karaboutis said she is working closely with other executives, including the company’s chief marketing officer, to help turn around the company. She said executives remain focused on their responsibilities and “delivering on our commitments” to customers, despite the uncertainty provoked by the ongoing proxy fight and shareholder vote at Dell scheduled for Friday.

CORRECTION: Steve Lucas is SAP’s president of platform solutions. An earlier version of this article said he was the company’s executive vice president in charge of analytics products. HANA has almost two thousand customers; an earlier version of this article incorrectly cited that figure as one thousand.

The NBA is using HANA on its website, but has not yet begun using Lumira. An earlier version of this article said the NBA was already using this tool.

Comments (5 of 14)

The way HANA works is that the entire column must be in-memory to be queried, unless you partition tables in which case the entire column partition must still be in memory. Partitioning is not a free ride, so basically the norm with HANA is to size the system so that all "active data" is in-memory.

Even to query one row the entire column or column partition must be brought into memory. If you don't have a sufficiently huge amount of RAM then you could get a situation where you will be paging columns or column partitions in and out of memory the whole time. That's really inefficient and slow.

IBM's DB2 10.5 with BLU acceleration is a free upgrade to existing SAP DB2 customers, and has a much more efficient architecture for people who choose not to try to store all data in-memory. Like HANA it is columnar, has very high compression, exploits SIMD and benefits from in-memory; but unlike HANA it can also read individual pages from disk, rather than whole columns. It also has maintains small, column-compressed synopsis tables that know what data ranges are in each 1024 rows (for all non-text columns plus all text key columns) so it can avoid unnecessary IO. Hence it should work very well with less memory.

It will be interesting to see what benchmarks IBM brings out now that SAP have announced support for BW and NLS with BLU acceleration.

11:43 am August 5, 2013

Al C wrote:

Amit,
If you are purging data from memory on some regular basis as you note, does this imply that HANA is really inteded for relatively current data? How does HANA support longer term trend analysis, etc? Another question, Paul notes that there is a high memory requirement per user, is this true and if it is, how is HANA using this memory and why does it need to be a large amount?

4:46 pm August 2, 2013

Amit wrote:

Paul - HANA can purge data out of memory if you want every hour, day, week, month, so technically you cannot run out of memory unless you are poorly architected for the workload you plan. You keep only the data you need in memory. Don't forget the benefits on simplification with HANA - you store less and in one place, you back up less and you restore less. Its a fantastic innovation that Oracle is running scared on!

4:01 pm August 2, 2013

Michael Segel wrote:

It shouldn't come as a shock that there will be scalability problems.
You have to apply the correct architecture to the problem you are trying to solve.

While you can scale out, in-memory machines, even with the data compressed will have to 'scale out' faster than if the data were on disk. 1 TB of memory is $$$$ vs 1 TB of disk. (Assuming that your nodes in your appliance are capable of physically having 1TB of memory.) So more nodes means more floor space, energy, etc...

The issue is how to best utilize the system in conjunction with the other systems inside the corporation's infrastructure.

Remember that Dell was an early adopter and that some of their pain was based in poorly set expectations as well as software not ready for prime time. (Its the price you pay when you're an early adopter.

What makes this article confusing... is this a story about Dell or SAP? If SAP, the article leads with SAP being a failure at Dell. It brings back memories of SAP and Nike ...

3:59 pm August 2, 2013

Nate wrote:

Hello, my name is Nate, and I work for Dell. You can learn more about Dell’s work with SAP HANA and our partnership on Dell’s "Direct2Dell" blog.

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